Scott Wolf on 'Kaijudo' season two and group voice acting sessions

Kaijudo may have started as a collectible card game from Wizards of the Coast, but it has evolved to a full-fledged animated series featuring parallel dimensions, epic creature battles, and a talented voice cast. Scott Wolf stars as Ray, gifted with the rare ability to connect with and befriend the creatures of the five magical Civilizations. This comes in handy when he must use his powers to defeat the evil mastermind called The Choten (The Mummy’s Oded Fehr.)

Ray and his friends, Allie and Gabe, return with a new series of adventures and challenges in Kaijudo: Clash of the Duel Masters starting this Friday. Wolf told EW what could be expected this season.

“By the end of last season, The Choten’s plans of world domination were thwarted by Ray and his team, but the Choten is going to be back,” said Wolf. “This season begins where they start to see in their hometown some crazy natural disasters happening and they figure out pretty quickly that it’s the work of The Choten. So they realize they’ll have to band together and fight him off once again,” he continued.

The anime-inspired cartoon series may highlight action and adventure that one can expect from a show with “duel” in the title, but according to Wolf, it is much more than the battles.

When asked about what stood about in particular about the show, he said, “There’s a really strong anti-bullying message and messages about friendship and loyalty. Like the relationship between Ray and Bob, who is his creature—they wind up having this really incredible and beautiful friendship.” He added, “For as much adventure and clash there is between creatures and people, the underlying feeling about what’s happening is about really protecting what is good and standing up for people that you love.”

Unlike many other animated projects, Kaijudo records the voice actors in group recording sessions. Typically, actors individually record their lines of dialogue and are later mixed together. But Wolf said, ”We all stand around and act scenes together. It’s like a radio play a lot of the time.”

He remarked on the unique dynamic of group voice acting. ”It’s a harder thing to pull off logistically just getting everybody in a room at the same time, but by design they do it because there’s something about the way it sounds when it’s being lived out by a bunch of actors in a room as opposed to actors isolated in a sound booth doing lines of dialogue one at a time,” he said.

But regardless of whether viewers can tell the difference, Wolf is grateful for the set-up. “It’s definitely a lot more fun to record it that way and I do think it brings everyone’s performance up,” he said.

Check out an exclusive clip from the season two premiere entitled “The Butterfly Effect.”

Kaijudo: Clash of the Duel Masters premieres Friday, June 21 at 6:30 PM ET on the Hub Network.